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I’ve been really slacking on this, and pretty much every other project in the log, so I figured I better do something.

I pulled the guitar open again to fix the mistakes I mentioned in the last installment, and Pottse helped take some footage of the guitar in action. You’ll notice a few things:

1) The pedal is really loud.
2) I’m not very good at playing with it.
3) I use the Star Power switch at the head of the guitar by pressing it against my cheek at 0:54 and 1:23.
4) I still haven’t figured out the whammy, but I’ve got a bunch of ideas.

Mrs. G and I tried to watch Renaissance tonight, but we only got 20 minutes in before Version 2.0 (the gigantic 4 month-old boy super-smiley blob-thingy) decided it was screamy time. Wifey took one for the team, and I decided to get back to the guitar.

I’ve been trying to come up with a good Whammy mechanism, and what I’m settling on (but still haven’t quite figured out how to do) is some kind of motion sensing thingy. Since this is the goal, my first priority is to disable the motion-activated Star Power switch. Since Star Power is also activated by one of the buttons on the guitar face, I can retain the functionality by moving that switch somewhere easily activated by the fret hand.

After putting the rodents to bed, Mrs. G, Pottse, the Berserker and I all sat down to watch Hot Fuzz, in HD no less, on the 360’s HD add-on. I could whine about how M$ had screwed me for months with the crappy Dynamic Range Control bug (fix here) and how I really want Blu-Ray to fail because it is associated with the PS3, and how I bought 300 on Blu-Ray anyway, because it was cheaper, but I won’t.

I had my first real roadblock today. Pottse was reading a Musician’s Friend catalog, and I was reminded of the pedal that came with my crappy Midi keyboard. (Of course, I could have used that if it weren’t buried with all the rest of the crap in the storeroom… do you see a trend here?)

Anyway, I dug through the catalog and found the keyboard sustain pedals. I’m not the most music equipment savvy guy, but I am pretty sure they are just a switch with a 1/4″ plug. This serves my purpose well, and they are anywhere from $13-20 for the cheap ones. Right within my threshold of pain.

For the first prototype, I slapped together some trim I had laying around, cardboard from the day’s Tanga shipment, and the Roller Lever Switch. I made a rough cavity in the trim for the switch to sit in, then taped it all together. Ghetto fabulous.